NGC 4027 — SBd in Corvus
SBd in Corvus, 3.5 arcminutes across, its light 80 million years old. Measured by HyperLEDA, photographed by Pan-STARRS1. Recorded once.
About NGC 4027
NGC 4027 is a one-armed spiral: a single long arm loops around one side of it, a sign that it has been disturbed by an encounter. It is a near neighbour of the Antennae Galaxies in the sky.
What you are looking at
NGC 4027 is a loose spiral with almost no central bulge; its arms are patchy and ragged, and rich in gas. A bar of stars runs straight across its centre, as one does across the centre of the Milky Way. It is tilted about 42° to our line of sight, enough to show both the shape of its arms and the depth of its disc. From edge to edge its visible disc spans about 82,000 light-years, about 84% of the Milky Way’s width.
What astronomers have recorded
Halton Arp included it in his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 22, a list of galaxies with unusual, disturbed shapes. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov listed it as VV 66 in his catalogue of interacting galaxies. One supernova has been recorded in it: SN 1996W. It is cited in 254 scientific papers indexed by SIMBAD, and recorded there under 27 different catalogue designations.
When this light set out
The light that reaches us from NGC 4027 today set out about 80 million years ago, when dinosaurs were at their peak. The galaxy is moving away from us at about 1,667 km/s (3.7 million mph), carried by the expansion of the universe.
Finding it in the sky
In the sky, NGC 4027 sits within the constellation Corvus. It is best placed on spring evenings: around 9:30 pm in April it stands about 31° high in the south, seen from the middle of the United States.
Its neighbours
At almost the same distance from us, and so its neighbours in space as well as on the sky: NGC 4027A (4′ away on the sky, at least 90,000 light-years from it); NGC 4039 (0.7° away on the sky, at least 950,000 light-years from it); Antennae Galaxies (0.7° away on the sky, at least 960,000 light-years from it); NGC 3981 (1.0° away on the sky, at least 1,410,000 light-years from it), and 2 more.
By apparent size it is number 340 of the 12,657 galaxies on the Galaxy Origins register.
Measurements
| Catalogue | PGC 37773 |
|---|---|
| Morphological type | SBd |
| Angular diameter | 3.54′ |
| Right ascension | 11h59m30.2s |
| Declination | -19°15′54.6″ |
| Constellation | Corvus |
| Inclination | 42.3° |
| Light travel time | 80 million years |
| Bar | yes, from the catalogue |
Check every figure above in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
What is sold
A print of this galaxy and the record of the calculation, once. When it sells it leaves the register and is not offered again. We assign no names and no ownership — nobody can sell you those.
At 3.5 arcminutes this is a Exceptional galaxy, which is the tier where a real photograph shows clear structure and dust lanes. The tier comes from the measured diameter, not from a price list.
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